EverFi has raised $190 million in Series D funding to continue teaching and engaging students on its unique digital platform the essential skills in life that are not normally covered in conventional classrooms – financial education, sexual assault prevention, workplace health, diversity and inclusion.
The TPG Rise and Growth Funds led the Series D investment, contributing $150 million, along with other backers. U2 lead singer Bono, a well-known activist and a partner with TPG Growth Fund, and Jeff Skoll, a global entrepreneur and impact investor, co-founded The Rise Fund.
What EverFi Is
EverFi digital-learning courses are delivered over a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model, allowing reach and scale. Its courses have been seen by 16 million students in the U.S. and Canada to date. Because it runs over SaaS, older PCs can be used along with more modern tablets and notebooks.
One example course is AlcoholEdu, an online alcohol prevention learning course. The digital course uses EverFi’s proprietary path-oriented and interactive user experience to provide a customized program for all students, based on their drinking choices and readiness to change. According to EverFi, over 90% of students who have taken AlcoholEdu have completed the course.
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Nehal Raj, a partner at TPG who leads tech investments, said that EverFi’s business meshes well with the firm’s investment thesis, which involves homing in on an outdated process in a market featuring relatively few competitors.
Education has traditionally been “done in a labor-intensive, inefficient way,” Raj said on a call, mentioning the paper-based products, in-person meetings, and binders filled with sign-in sheets and lists of checkboxes, that are its hallmarks.
EverFi “automates all that in a tech-centric way,” Raj added.
Based in Washington, D.C., EverFi has about 200 employees. The company sells software subscriptions to schools and businesses that help teach financial literacy (understanding mortgages and credit, for example), responsible college behavior (involving hazing and alcohol consumption), corporate compliance (like sexual harassment and diversity training), and other programs.
Among the firm’s customers are Google, Oracle (ORCL), Whole Foods (WFM), and Airbnb, as well as universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford and 20,000 K-12 schools.
Sources: Forbes, TechCrunch, EverFi
